Category Archives: Internet

The Project

I started The Project primarily so I could learn PHP. I’ve been using ASP (classic and .Net) for a while now, but wanted to try another web development language, preferably one that would be compatible with my dirt cheap web hosting. The way I envisaged it, it would be straight HTML/CSS, no fancy AJAX, using PHP and database lookups.

For development, I set up a Virtual PC with Win2K on it (quickest, best, easiest basic Windows version I had an unused licence for) and put IIS and PHP and MySQL on it. All reasonably easy. For database admin I put on PhpMyAdmin; it’s what runs on my web ISP, and is reasonably easy to use. For the IDE I looked around at Zend and some of the other paid tools, but decided to try DevPHP, a freeware thing, until I figured out if this project was going to fly.

It was all going well until I wanted to do some mod_rewrite fiddling with .htaccess. There are a few things around the place that purport to make mod_rewrite (or an approximation of it) work in IIS, but nothing seemed to do it well. In a fit of rage I ended up removing IIS and going the whole hog and installing Apache instead. It actually runs very well on Windows, and (after re-installing PHP and doing some config fiddling) matches my web ISP much better than any version of IIS could.

After using it for a bit, I also got a bit fed-up with PhpMyAdmin, which is particularly laborious for entering data. It’ll only do two records at a time, and semi-regularly seemed to ignore the second. Then I found the MySql GUI tools, which by comparison are an absolute Godsend. Why did nobody tell me about this before? (Actually it looks like I found a bit of it some time ago, but hadn’t used it properly until now.)

The coding has been coming along nicely, and the basic functionality is ready. I’ve got a couple more enhancements I’d like to do before it goes public.

So what is The Project? Not telling. But it’s aimed at non-geeks, going to be free for users, with Google Adsense to try and pull in some income (and get it indexed quickly). Maybe it’ll pay for itself, maybe not. But even if not, it’s already been successful as a way for me to learn some PHP.

Update 2007-04-19: The Project is now live.

Tiring of Firefox?

FF IEWhile the Windows animated cursor vulnerability is getting patched, George Ou at ZDNet has highlighted a Firefox vulnerability (known to exist, but will not be made fully public until a patch is available) and noted that while IE7 under Vista runs in Protected Mode, with reduced (read-only) access to user data, Firefox doesn’t. And there’s no shortage of Firefox vulnerabilities recently.

Of course Protected Mode is Vista-only, so those of us hanging back with Windows XP won’t see the benefits. But it does leave me wondering: is the Firefox mantra of “Safer, faster, better” still true?

Safer: Well IE7 is more secure than previous versions, and even IE6 can fairly easily be secured against most ActiveX, particularly under XP SP2. Here’s a nice wrap-up of their security features. Who is quicker to patch their vulnerabilities? Mozilla or Microsoft?

Faster: Opera has previously shown to be fastest. But IE should have a natural speed advantage, by being part of the Operating System, and loaded into memory with other applications, such as applications that use HTML Help. And doesn’t it share code with Windows Explorer as well?

Firefox on old machines is particularly concerning to me (and others). As I write this, FF has one window with two tabs open, and is claiming 81Mb of memory.

What’s more noticeable is that, with no scientific basis for claiming it, IE7 seems faster to me than FF 1.5 or 2.0. Interesting.

Better: Obviously this is a general comment. When I think back, what got me over to Firefox from IE6? Tabs — now in IE7, though I still like the “feel” of the tabs in FF better (in fact I prefer FF 1.5 to 2.0, just because I’m used to it). Popup blocker — now in IE7. Security — see above. What else? Other than a wish to help IE lose market share and sock it to the Evil Empire, I can’t think of much right now.

The FF Web Developer toolbar is great, but IE has a comparable product — admittedly though there are loads of community-written FF extensions. Indeed, Jeff Atwood highlights the very powerful web developer tools available for FF, for which IE has no equivalent.

There are still web sites (particularly on Intranets) that work in IE but are partially broken in FF. And that Firefox tooltip bug is still not fixed.

So will I switch back? Maybe not, out of inertia. And not unless Google (or someone else) does a browser sync for IE — though there’s no shortage of manual ways of getting bookmarks between IE and FF.

And of course, anybody involved in web development (as I am) should check their web sites in both (and Safari and Opera, preferably).

For everyday browsing though, IE is probably back to being as good as FF, and possibly faster. And while I really like FF, I do think it’s become less compelling to install FF on new/rebuilt machines — particularly older ones.

Easy ways to save bandwidth

After reading Jeff Atwood’s terrific post about saving bandwidth on web sites I’ve moved the Geekrant RSS feeds over to Feedburner, using Steve Smith’s mavellous WordPress Feedburner plugin, which works in WP 2.0x and 1.5x.

I also turned on HTTP compression, which in WordPress is as easy as clicking a checkbox. It not only saves you bandwidth, but users get your pages served quicker, since the bottleneck is bound to be their bandwidth, not their browser’s ability to decompress.

We’ll see how it goes. Bandwidth has been growing recently: January 2.8Gb; February 2.7Gb; March 3.4Gb. It’s not at ludicrous levels, but if it keeps climbing, I’ll end up paying more for the hosting. Hopefully this will help bring it back down.

Update 8:40pm. First thing I notice is that when reading the feed from within the Feedburner site, it doesn’t treat relative paths to images properly. I guess I’ll have to put absolute paths, ‘cos at the moment in the previous post it’s trying to load http://feeds.feedburner.com/files/2007/mediagate-mg35.jpg instead of http://www.geekrant.org/files/2007/mediagate-mg35.jpg. I wonder how it treats relative links?

Friday brief stuff

Google for the Enterprise: Google Apps Premier edition is here. $50 / user account / year, providing Gmail, GTalk, GCalendar, GDocs & Spreadsheets, GPage with guaranteed uptimes, phone support and more storage and options.

Favicons: Good article on making a good favicon.

One commenter left a useful link to the PNG2ICO command-line tool. This online tool also looks handy.

RIP: Robert Adler, the man who invented the TV remote control (despite not watching much TV himself, apparently).

RSS vs old-fashioned browsers

I got interested in checking out the number of subscribers to my feeds, since Google Reader is now revealing it in the user-agent.

Here are the figures from my personal blog.

bloglines.com /feed/ 26
bloglines.com /feed/atom/ 2
reader.google.com /feed/atom/ 8
reader.google.com /feed/ 21
reader.google.com /feed/rss2/ 1
feedshow.com /feed/ 1
netvibes.com /feed/ 2
newsAlloy.com /feed/atom/ 1
newsgator.com /feed/rss2/ 1
newsgator.com /feed/rdf 1
rojo.com /feed/ 1

Bloglines is reporting as two separate readers for /feed/ – perhaps different versions?

So 65 subscribers from those aggregator services that report on numbers.

Whereas the home page is getting around 240 hits per day, many from individuals, but also a lot from search engine bots. (No I haven’t got the energy to work it out precisely.)

So it would appear that despite the growing popularity of aggregators, many people continue to just hit the web pages manually.

These figures are much lower than for many, but it reflects a similar result to what Ed Bott found in his stats.

Australian PM spam

Someone’s spamming Australian email addresses with a fake news bulletin about PM John Howard having had a heart attack. It includes a link supposedly to The Australian newspaper, but which in fact goes to http://www.theau-news.org/ The spams come from a variety of addresses, with subject lines such as “John Howard, the current Prime Minister of Australia have survived a heart attack” and “Best surgeons are struggling for the life of the Prime Minister”.

The domain was registered only a few days ago, to a post-office box in Nova Scotia, Canada, and apparently the site tries to install malware.

SYDNEY, February 18, 2007 08:56pm (AEDT) – The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard have survived a heart attack. Mr Howard, 67 years old, was at Kirribilli House in Sydney, his prime residence, when he was suddenly stricken. Mr Howard was taken to the Royal North Shore Hospital where the best surgeons of Australia are struggling for his life.

Click on the link below to get the latest information on the health of the Prime Minister:

The Australian – keeping the nation informed
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Stupidity

Google Inc today lost a copyright fight launched by Belgian French-language newspapers which demanded the web search service remove their stories, claiming it infringed copyright laws. … They complained that the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis. It was unclear if Google would have to pay a fine.

— Wire story: Google loses case against Belgian papers

That’s just stupid. You don’t need to go around suing search engines to stop your stuff getting into their databases. Every web developer who knows anything about this knows you just need to drop a robots.txt file onto your web site and it stops all search engines and archivers stone dead.

To ignore that, and send the lawyers in instead just looks like you’re not looking for a solution, you’re looking for money.

The cost of the pitch

What spammers don’t seem to realise is that advertising doesn’t scale. Spruikers know this — that’s why every shop doesn’t have one, it would be a cacophony of noise. Junk (snail) mail people know this — if everybody’s mail box was flooded 100% of the time, everybody would get a No Junk Mail sticker. (Mind you I did once get 28 items in one day.) Telemarketers… well, they may not have figured it out yet.

In fact no, I’ve changed my mind. It’s all about the cost of the pitch. As the cost approaches zero, and assuming there’s no regulations preventing it, there’s more pitching. So those who don’t batton down the phone hatches like I do get endless calls. And spammers flood email boxes, despite that their pitch would work better if it was the only one that arrived that day. Not to mention if it wasn’t in broken English.

Which is why my Gmail spam folder currently has 2702 items in it.

Do people wanting to buy Cialis and Viagra actually wait around for a spam to arrive telling them how to get it? Why don’t they just go to the chemist?

DealsDepot.com.au is spamming blogs

People are comment-spamming blogs on behalf of DealsDepot.com.au. The comments I’m getting look something like this:

Name: mirror
E-mail: mirrorconsultancy@yahoo.com
IP: 125.22.69.34

Talking of [topic], may be if you want to buy [product] at best price, I have a suggestion to make do look up Online Shopping

I’ve had about a dozen of these today, hitting various entries, where the topic closely resembles the topic of the blog post hit, though the link to [product] is often tenuous.

Apparently (see comment 16 here) the company offers discounts from products in return for people posting blog comments about them. Certainly looking around they appear to be successfully hitting a lot of blogs.

Not mine though.

More examples after the fold.
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SFTP from scheduled tasks

I was asked to set up a daily SFTP job to push files off a Windows box.

Windows has FTP built-in. But SFTP? Well there’s the free (and open-source) Putty implementation which provides a number of SSH tools, including SFTP. Free is good. I like free.

Putty SFTP is fairly straightforward to use from the command line; pretty similar to any other ftp client. Basically chuck everything into a directory and you can run it directly. Under Windows it caches public keys into the Windows Registry in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and will ask about this the first time.

For batch use, you can create a BAT file that calls it like this

psftp -l [user] -pw [password] [host] -P [port] -b [scriptfile]

…and just put your FTP commands into the script file.

For running it as a scheduled task, you’d preferably want to run it under a special user, as you wouldn’t want it under your own user account. It seems not to like asking about caching unless you’re the person logged in. Even running with RUNAS didn’t work for me — it flashed up something lightning-fast, but immediately failed.

The only way around it I could find was to log on interactively as the scheduled task user. As expected it asked the first time. Subsequent times it didn’t ask, and worked happily as a scheduled task.

(Also found recently: How to set up an SFTP server on a Windows machine. Or a prefab one like FreeFtpD is also an option.)